In Memory of the Dead – a journey through Northern Germany’s memorial sites and freedom’s fragile frontier

In Memory of the Dead

Embark on a thought-provoking, beautiful and necessary journey into the land of memory in northern Germany. Visit the Jewish Museum in Rendsburg. The former concentration camp at Neuengamme. And the memorial sites at Ladelund and Husum-Schwesing, just south of the Danish border.

In many ways, this is an unbearable story.
So many lives torn away.
So much injustice.
So much blindness, brutality and hatred.

And yet, for precisely that reason, it is our duty to remember.
Not because we can comprehend it.
Not because we can explain it.
But because it happened.

Because words cannot contain the horrors of war, we must continue to speak.
For the hope of remaining human — even when the world is not — is the final defense against barbarism.

This route is based on the book I Was Here. The book was created through a collaboration between seven museums and destination organizations north and south of the Danish border. Ask for it at one of the museums featured on this page.

Remember History

This route is not about understanding — but about remembering.
About acknowledging that history does not move safely forward towards freedom, equality and humanity.

Hannah Arendt reminded us how easily the surface of civilization can fracture:

When truth dissolves,
when people are kept in uncertainty,
when fear overshadows community —
a space opens
in which the inhuman can grow.

It happened then.
It can happen again.

Remembering is therefore not a gesture towards the past.
It is a responsibility in the present.

For only when we dare to face the horrors do we understand the value of what is human.

We remember the dead
to defend the living.

© Destination Trekantomraadet. Foto: Frame & Work 

The Jewish Museum Rendsburg – Broken Lives

In the former synagogue complex in Rendsburg, the museum tells the story of Jewish life in Schleswig-Holstein — before, during and after the war. Of the many who disappeared, and the few who returned.

In the exhibition, you meet Emmy Maßmann, whose only ‘crime’ was that three out of four of her grandparents were of Jewish descent. Her father was a naval officer. She was baptized as a Christian and married to an ‘Aryan’. This granted her certain privileges. Among other things, she was not required to wear the yellow star.

During 1942, however, the tone hardened. And in the spring of 1944, she was arrested, classified as Jewish, and deported to Auschwitz.

In the shadow of the ever-burning chimneys of the crematoria, she was subjected to hard labour, cold, poor food and countless blows with truncheons.

Emmy Maßmann recalled:

“It was a difficult time in Auschwitz. There were daily selections, and I never knew whether today or tomorrow would be my turn. Young or old — everyone had to go and say farewell to the world, if it suited Dr Mengele.”

Amid the misery, Emmy was skilled at keeping her spirits up. She tells:

“In the evenings, when the stars stood in the sky, I spoke to you.
And when the birds flew past, I sent greetings with them to you.”

She survived.

But many of her neighbours did not.

The museum does not only tell of death — but of lives destroyed.
Of families, names, letters and traditions — and of the systematic extermination that began with registration and ended in the gas chambers.

Here, everyone knew:
If you were sent to the B sauna, death awaited.

Visit the Jewish Museum in Rendsburg and receive a copy of the poem Emmy wrote about her time in the concentration camp. Place it in your book I Was Here.

The Jewish Museum in Rendsburg has existed in its present form since 1988. It is housed in a former Talmud Torah school from the 18th century, expanded in 1844–45 with a synagogue. Today, the site serves as both museum and memorial to the former Jewish life of Schleswig-Holstein. Here, you can learn about Jewish history, religion, identity and culture.

The Memorial Sites at Ladelund and Husum-Schwesing

© Destination Trekantomraadet. Foto: Frame& Work

Places for Remembrance

Neuengamme was not one place — but a vast administrative system of more than 85 labour camps.

Two of these camps were located in North Frisia: Husum-Schwesing and Ladelund.

Here, thousands of prisoners were forced to dig anti-tank trenches for the so-called Friesenwall — a military defense system that, in practice, never served any real purpose.

The camps existed for only a few months in 1944, but that was enough time for hundreds to die. Cold, mud, beatings, diarrhea, hunger and merciless labour claimed them one by one.

© Destination Trekantomraadet. Foto: Frame& Work

Many of the dead were men from the Dutch village of Putten, where almost all men aged between 18 and 50 were deported in retaliation for a sabotage action, they themselves had not carried out.

Among them was Wouter Rozendaal.

He survived — through chance, strength and hope.

He escaped from the Germans during an evacuation march as the column passed through a forest. He was captured by Soviet forces. But escaped. And received help from the Americans to cross the River Elbe. Continued on foot. Got a lift. Stole a bicycle without tires. Lost it again.

On 5 June 1945, he finally returned home to his wife and children.

Of the 661 deported from Putten, only 49 survived.

Wouter was one of them.

He returned to Ladelund in 1979 — as part of the tradition that binds the Ladelund Memorial Site and Putten together through mutual visits and enduring connections.

That is what you experience today:

KZ-Gedenk- und Begegnungsstätte Ladelund

In Ladelund, you encounter the cemetery, the graves and the memorial stone — a place where silence speaks.

When you visit the Ladelund Memorial Site, you can receive a reproduction of a drawing by prisoner E. Wellerdieck, depicting the brutal labour on the Friesenwall.

KZ Memorial Site Husum-Schwesing

At Husum-Schwesing, the remains of the camp still stand: foundations, a fire hydrant, the exhibition, and the surrounding landscape where the forced labour took place.

Neuengamme Memorial – The Monument of Silence

Neuengamme was established in 1938 in a former brickworks south-east of Hamburg.

In 1940, the camp was expanded and became an independent concentration camp.

From here grew a system of more than 85 satellite camps, where prisoners were subjected to forced labour — among them the Elbe Command, where inmates often worked barefoot in knee-deep mud. They were beaten with truncheons and rifle butts and were frequently forced to carry between 20 and 30 dead prisoners back to the camp after a day’s labour.

Or at Husum-Schwesing and Ladelund, where thousands dug to construct the Friesenwall — a defense structure that never came to matter but cost lives in the hundreds.

More than 100,000 people were forced to work within the Neuengamme camp complex.

At least 42,900 died — from starvation, disease, exhaustion, abuse or execution.

© Destination Trekantomraadet. Foto: Frame& Work

A French prisoner later described it like this:

“There was open terror — it was like being on another planet.”

Today, Neuengamme is a vast, open memorial landscape. The barracks are gone, but their outlines remain etched into the ground like a map of suffering.

You can enter 17 preserved buildings and see:

• Time Traces — the main exhibition in a former prisoner barrack
• The exhibition on the SS camp system, housed in the former garage buildings
• And the enormous hall of the former brickworks, where you can see the remains of one of the kilns that once fired bricks for Hitler’s plans to create a new Hamburg — Germany’s “gateway to the world”

The new Hamburg was meant to be immense, monumental and grand in every way. The architecture of power — then as now — demanded vast quantities of bricks. And so thousands of prisoners were worked to death, digging clay, handling the heavy material, and pushing loaded tip wagons of clay along rattling rails and up a long outdoor concrete ramp.

Neuengamme profited from leasing prisoners as labour to German industrial companies. It was a system in which everything human was reduced to function.

Neuengamme is not a place you understand.
It is a place you feel.
And remember.

When you visit the Neuengamme Memorial, you can obtain a sticker at the service point featuring a drawing by Jens Martin Sørensen of the prison camp and roll-call square. Place it in your book I Was Here.